


L'appel du vide (English translation)

by unhappy_matt



Category: We Need to Talk About Kevin - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Fragmented Narration, Incestuous Undertones, Internalized Fatphobia, Introspection, Psychological Analysis, ableism (ymmv), fucked-up family dynamics, mention of body image issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-15
Updated: 2019-11-15
Packaged: 2021-01-31 11:49:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21445741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unhappy_matt/pseuds/unhappy_matt
Summary: In a different life, Eva Khatchadourian loves her son.
Relationships: Eva Khatchadourian/Kevin Khatchadourian
Comments: 12
Kudos: 35





	1. white

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [L'appel du vide](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9589070) by [unhappy_matt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unhappy_matt/pseuds/unhappy_matt). 

> HI!
> 
> I re-emerge from my dark cave to come back to a tiny fandom I was really into in 2016-2017. At the time, I'd gotten very obsessed with the movie and the novel, and I wrote three fics in Italian which I never ended up translating.   
Back then I didn't feel confident in my ability to write a complex story in English, and my Italian style is quite flowery and not very easy to translate.  
Now I feel like my skills have matured enough for me to try. Recently a few readers have shown interest in my Kevin fics and let me know they tried reading them despite not speaking the language. It completely blows my mind that someone could be interested in my writing enough to go through all that discomfort; I can't express how freaking GRATEFUL and HAPPY and C R Y I N G I am. <3<3   
Thank you. This is amazing. You people have given me the motivation to finally attempt this translation.  
I don't know how... alive... this fandom currently is, but well, here goes nothing.  
I hope this fic can be accessible to a wider audience now that it's in English. ^^
> 
> I have stayed faithful to my original text almost to the letter, translating it in its entirety. You aren't going to miss out on any part or scene.  
I have adjusted and tweaked a few phrases in order to make them flow better in English, but the overall meaning is maintained. I apologize if the style sounds a bit awkward and stilted, that is because I translated from my first language to my second language.   
I did this by myself and I am... not... a very careful or patient editor, so I take responsibility for any mistakes, pls point them out to me. Englishing is hard. 
> 
> Lastly, I made the decision to split the original one-shot into chapters, as I think this format might make the English text more fluid.

_In a different life, Eva Khatchadourian loves her son._

Eva is sitting in a hospital bed, staring at the white wall in front of her. By her side, her husband Franklin rests his hand delicately on her shoulder; his touch barely registers.

Her ears are reached by the muffled, indistinct noises of a morning that seems just like any other.

A morning in which her entire world was supposed to stop; to be shattered by an explosion of light and heat that would blow away everything that had existed before, to make room for a new beginning.

A new being. A child that she and the man she loves have conceived together.

This is how everyone had described this moment to her. Everyone – her doctor, her gynecologist, the obstetricians, the nurses, all of the friends and acquaintances and strangers that over the last months have been witnesses to the progressive and immeasurable swelling of her belly, to the struggling and fighting of her body until it surrendered to the roundness of pregnancy.

Only, this moment does not feel like that.

Eva notices the faint, dull pain of her arms tensing under the weight of the tiny body her husband has handed to her, bundled up in a soft baby blanket.

The child. Her… baby.

Eva should hold it. She should look at it.

She doesn’t.

She doesn’t do it because her arms are aching and her entire body is exhausted, and no matter how hard she tries to find search within herself, she finds none of the emotions that she was told were crucial components of motherhood.

There is no euphoria. No overwhelming tidal wave of the love at first sight, unconditional and eternal, that is supposed to grasp her by her heart and her stomach and give meaning to every hour of nausea and panic and anxiety and second thoughts.

“Eva?”

Franklin’s kind voice, quiet and vaguely concerned, swims through her ears like it’s coming from thousands of miles away.

A warm beam of sunlight seeps through the window pane and cuts diagonally across Eva’s face, blinding her. For one moment, half of her field of vision is swallowed by golden light.

Eva’s lips move, but her voice won’t come.

In the place of the emotions she is supposed to feel – _this_ is the truth – all Eva feels is _emptiness_.

The baby moves in her arms. Small, bony bundle that all of a sudden comes to life in her hands.

The child starts to cry.

He demands her attention, and this already is a manifestation of will that is too overwhelming, too urgent.

In the stainless room the sound is shrill, grating, deafening. Like an alarm siren that drills into the most remote part of her brain, and all of a sudden nothing else exists. This will never stop, Eva knows it then, nothing will ever put an end to this noise.

Abruptly she lets her gaze fall down on her son.

His tiny fists have slipped out of the blanket and they’re pressed against the small, round face, crimson and twisted into an unhappy grimace.

A tuft of dark hair. Huge black eyes, open wide, still nebulous, meet Eva’s eyes.

Her son. They have decided to name him Kevin.

Eva moves her arms uneasily, attempting to cradle him. She tries to bend her fingers into a caress, to mold them into a hug; they remain stiff, uncooperative.

Franklin takes over, cooing soft, comforting words and lifting Kevin up, relieving Eva of that human weight of flesh and noise that seems to her so completely _foreign_.

Eva looks down, stares at her pale and swollen hands, abandoned in her lap among the wrinkles of the light bed sheet. The whiteness of the walls and the floor is disconcertingly dazzling.

Along the corridor just outside the door, on her left, the whirling of a gurney being moved, the shuffling of light and hasty steps. The fragment of a conversation slips past the doorway while two people, perhaps two doctors, walk past the room.

Kevin keeps screaming.

Eva stays unmoving. She is no longer there.

She is in a small medieval village in southern France; she is walking through the narrow cobblestone streets, sinking her teeth into a _macaron_ that melts on her tongue and floods her palate and her nostrils with a sweet pistachio flavor.

She’s in Barcelona. She wades through the _ramblas_ on a night in August, drinking _sangr__í__a_ from a bottle glistening with ice. The summer heat coats her body like a cloak, sweat dips down her spine in small drops.

She’s in the lands of her parents, Erevan, between mountain and river. She visits the cathedral, walking along the pathway in solemn silence as the biting Autumn wind twirls around her legs.

_Home. _

For the briefest instant her mind is far away, and Eva knows that she would give up everything that she has for her body to follow.

Momentarily soothed by Franklin, Kevin’s crying ceases.

In that moment, like an elastic band being tensed almost to its rupture point and then released back with a snap, Eva returns to the present.

It’s in that very moment that she understands, she understands entirely, that this… _thing_, this emptiness inside of her, in her belly, in her breast – this is something she will never be able to share with anyone.

This is not allowed. This is not admissible.

No one will listen, and no one will ever understand.

It is the first commandment of being a mother. The only thing, perhaps, that she should be able to do.

And she has already broken it.

How can she be a mother, when she is a woman who looks at her own child and feels _nothing_?


	2. brown

Time passes. Hours and days turn into years and Eva holds her breath.

Eva thinks.

Eva dreams.

Time flows by and Eva imagines another life.

A life in which she loves Kevin, and Kevin loves her back.

Because there is no possibility of doubt, there is no deluding herself: Kevin loathes her.

Since the first day he never did anything but turn away from her. Kevin never wanted to be a son – _her_ son – any more than Eva ever desired to be his mother.

Kevin is three years old.

He is sitting on the wooden floor and he stares at her with his big, dark eyes.

Eva rolls the big red ball in his direction; Kevin refuses to send it back. His tiny hands remain lifeless, abandoned, between his chubby legs.

He would be a beautiful boy if he smiled, if he talked more. Eva knows he is capable of talking. The pediatrician who visited him recently stated that there’s nothing wrong with Kevin.

There is nothing left for her to do but to smile at him with boiling fury, sensing inside of her that he’s doing this on purpose, that he’s making fun of her. He’s humiliating her.

_“Will you say ‘Mom’, Kev? Come on. Say ‘Mom’.”_

Kevin stares at her, his tiny face scrunched up in a frown.

His black eyes are, and always have been, entirely indecipherable to her.

Kevin throws the ball to a side, with sudden energy.

_“No.”_

That is the extent of Kevin’s response.

Eva feels inside of her the rising of a feral rage. It grows, it fills her whole body, it become enormous and terrifying.

For a moment Eva is dizzy, as if the floor had started shaking under her feet. It’s her who is trembling and she doesn’t notice.

“As you want.”

She lets him win this game.

Eva stands up and she walks out of the room.

-

When she’s walking down the street, Eva looks at other women who have children approximately Kevin’s age, and she fantasizes about having a child like theirs.

A child who laughs and who takes his mom’s face in his hands; a child who blows kisses and plays and learns to eat properly, without forcing her to scream in front of yet another plate shattered on the floor.

Eva imagines being happy, at forty, of not working and spending her days at home.

She imagines what it must be like to have a husband who doesn’t look at her with that stupid expression every time she tries to interact with her own son. That mixture of pity, disapproval, and _disappointment_, no matter what Eva tries to do.

Kevin is five years old.

One day, for a brief moment, Eva’s fragile self-control cracks.

She grabs Kevin and she slams him into the wall.

It’s a strong blow for a small child; but Kevin, with his broken arm, does not let out a single sound.

A thousand different emotions wash through her all at once.

This is the time she is going to be punished for real, Eva thinks in a moment of devastating dread. This time, everyone will know that she did this to him, and that it’s because her son is unmanageable and she just cannot be the perfect mommy who continues to smile through cleaning feces.

Without her saying anything, Kevin tells the doctor and his father that he tripped and fell by himself.

Kevin guards the secret of Eva’s terrible mistake, and from the moment, he has a hold over her.

He demands his every whim to be satisfied, and Eva yields.

She makes the sandwich he wants and scrapes it off without speaking when Kevin, in front of her eyes, smashes it onto the freshly cleaned table.

Kevin doesn’t want to go shopping with her, he’s tired, he wants to go home, and Eva takes him back home.

He mocks, with a malice that is so exquisitely childish – or maybe purely _his_ – Eva’s clumsy attempts to explain to him that what happened was really horrible; that he was so good and so brave, and that mommy is truly sorry and it will never happen again.

Kevin _blackmails her_ with an ease that no child should know.

It was Eva herself who gave him that power, and now she can no longer claim it back.

That night, Eva slips into his bedroom on her tiptoes a couple hours after Kevin decided he was ready to go to bed.

She watches him, lying on his back, the whitish shape of the plaster around a small arm resting along his side. His small torso rises and lowers, almost imperceptibly, following the pace of his calm and regular breathing.

Eva inhales and imagines a child who will be happy to see her when he wakes up.

A child who will hug her tight and chatter enthusiastically about what his day will be like and all the fun things he wants to do with his friends.

She imagines a broken arm caused by a real accident.

She wishes she hadn’t been the one to hurt him.

-

A few years later Kevin has a fever.

That is one of the extremely rare occasions that Eva can remember in which, for a few hours, she catches a glimpse of something different through the cracks of the mask that her son always wears.

Physically exhausted, for a while Kevin suspends the war he wages against her. For a while, he goes back to being a child, a small child who is still young and alone and afraid.

Kevin passes out on the floor rather than having to turn to her for help – but in the end he gives in, because Kevin needs his mom.

It’s the first time Eva doesn’t feel like an intruder, the first time she feels that she can truly take care of him.

Kevin allows her to tend to him and together they read “Robin Hood”.

Eva smiles, incredulously. _Happy_.

She has no reason to imagine that this might be the beginning of the _end_.

Two days later Kevin is feeling better. When he suddenly talks back sharply, the way he always does, the spell is broken.

As if nothing had ever occurred, they go back to their usual, monotonous normality.

That night, Eva jolts awake and sits up in her bed, her skin coated in a layer of cold sweat.

In the silence the beating of her heart is loud and dark like the vibrations of a hundred drums being struck at the same time.

She covers her mouth with her hands, instinctively, because she remembers a scream. She can’t understand if it belongs to someone else or if it came from her own mouth; if it was real or imagined.

The fragments of a nightmare are still vivid, flashing in front of her eyes for many long minutes as Eva fights to push them out of her consciousness.

She dreamed she was the monster.

Her son Kevin was fragile and helpless and he called for her desperately. He was stretching out his small arms in her direction, and he was crying.

And then he was hiding into a corner, hugging his knees to his chest.

Swallowed by Eva’s shadows as the slowly approached him.

She dreamed of hurting him.

In her dream, as she did so, Eva felt an indescribable joy.


	3. green

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Franklin hadn't wanted a second child.

Franklin hadn’t wanted a second child.

Already they weren’t young when they had first decided to try for their first. When her husband discovered she was pregnant again, against all that they had agreed upon, Eva knows that he never quite forgave her completely for it.

Celia, however, is a beautiful child. Since the beginning she is extremely quiet and pleasant.

Franklin warms up to her quickly, although perhaps not as much as he was enamored with little Kevin. Eva does not quite fall in love at first sight with her daughter, either; but this time she is prepared, she is more confident, more certain in her decision.

She makes up her mind that this second experience with maternity will not be a failure.

Kevin does not like this new development and he makes no effort to disguise it. In the end, though, he too appears to capitulate.

He _gets used to it_, like he had said to Eva through his teeth, while he snapped his colored crayons one by one, after she had first told him the news.

He gets used to it, even though getting used to something does not mean that he likes it.

Since Celia’s birth, it only gets worse between Eva and Franklin, every interaction more tense and more sour.

They rarely fight; it’s as if an invisible wall of silence has been erected between them.

Their only subject of conversation is nonsensical chatter, light and innocuous topics. They use their daughter’s soothing and reassuring presence as a common ground.

Celia is always eager to shower them with affectionate gestures and bright smiles. She grows sheltered and protected, trusting of the people around her; a dreamer, a bit absent-minded. Celia has no reason to notice that her parents, as soon as they’re in the same room alone, are often cold and act around each other with the same cautious wariness of two strangers.

Kevin, too, grows.

Skittish, dark, wild, always sneering at everything others might find amusing or captivating.

The only true passion he manifests any interest in is archery. His fascination with Robin Hood’s story, as it turns out, was not merely a passing childish fixation.

Franklin, as always, is happy to indulge him and he buys Kevin the most expensive and professional equipment he can find for a boy in elementary school.

Kevin’s talent is precocious, almost innate, and it sharpens with each passing day.

Eva watches him shoot with perfect aim and she presses her lips tightly, but she says nothing.

When she sees father and son in the garden, seemingly united by that pastime, Eva dreams of still being in a happy relationship.

She imagines Kevin as if he weren’t Franklin’s child; as if he were the son of another man instead, one of her lovers from long ago, the casual companions with whom she shared a makeshift bed during her travels.

The fantasy could almost be reality; Kevin never had anything of Franklin in him, in his looks or in his temperament.

If his father were another man… if another man were by Eva’s side, another the man who has raised him, would Kevin be different?

Sometimes the temptation arises in Eva to believe that it was the pregnancy who acted as a catalyst, deterministically, for the beginning of everything.

Maybe her fault was that of having generated a child, of having conceived him and birthed him, through her own body. At the age of thirty-seven she decided to fulfill her _biological destiny_ while remaining conscious, every step of the way, through every single instant, of just how much all of herself was revolting against that leap of faith.

Eva thinks of Kevin and she imagines not being his biological mother. She imagines having adopted him, or being his stepmother. The parental figure watching over someone else’s child.

She has carried Kevin inside of her, and yet he has never been a _part_ of her. Even after years, Eva remembers that Kevin was always something _other_, something _alien_ from her.

If she hadn’t carried him in her womb, if she hadn’t had to sense him since the beginning like a parasite to which she had to surrender her resources, would it be easier to understand him? Would the mind of her son be just as impenetrable, an enigma hidden in a place so remote that nobody seems capable of reaching it?

Eva searches for an answer that seems to escape her, remaining just out of her reach.

She has carried in her womb Celia, too, she has given birth to her; only Kevin, though, is… whatever Kevin is. So irredeemably different from the rest of his family.

Franklin doesn’t see, of course.

To him, Kevin is “Just a kid who’s a little rowdy!” and everything Kevin says and does is the source of pride and satisfaction.

Instead Eva looks at Kevin, and – what’s that saying? _The mother is always certain, the father is uncertain_.

There is nothing of Franklin in Kevin, but he takes after her. He has Eva’s dark hair and dark eyes, her pale skin. His face and his body still carry over a bit of baby fat, but they seem to forewarn the bony edges of a quick growth spurt, stretching the fabric of the clothes he insists on wearing even though they’re getting too small.

A new version of her. Younger, more beautiful.

Still incomplete.


	4. blue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The other life.

_“Maybe you should go see a shrink,”_ are the words her husband spits at her after yet another fight. The harshness is not unexpected, but cutting all the same.

Franklin is in a terrible mood. At a different time Eva might have forgiven him for what he just said. She has the option of acting patient and understanding, of waiting for him to realize he overstepped and apologize.

Instead she loses her temper. She raises her voice. Franklin walks away, slamming their bedroom door.

Eva finds herself alone, rigidly sat over the bedspread, her torso hunched forward. Fury trembles and burns inside her, not at all placated.

All she did was try to tell her husband that she does not like the way Kevin plays with Celia. This time he tied her up with Christmas garlands and Celie, happy to receive her older brother’s attention, put up no resistance. Kevin even gagged her, she could have suffocated… but Franklin only thought to treat the whole matter as if it were very a funny little anecdote. And when Eva tried to step in, when she angrily asked him to do something to punish their son, Franklin treated her like she was crazy.

Eva is not crazy, and she has no intention of seeing any _shrink_.

She has no interest in talking to yet another person who will speak to her in a condescending voice, someone who will explain to her how she’s supposed to live her own life.

Someone who will write her every word down on a notebook, judging her as if anyone else could know what it’s like.

Smiling bitterly to herself, Eva wonders how a therapist might react if she told him about her _recurring fantasy_ that has been accompanying her for years, at this point. That world in a faraway corner of her mind to which sometime she escapes, when her everyday reality becomes unbearable.

_The other life._

A life in which her son, now a teenager, has for her something other than absolute detachment and a scorn so sour and sharp that it surpasses every of Franklin’s insinuating jabs at her mental sanity.

-

_“No.”_

With a single word, in a moment Kevin destroys the fragile mixture of hope and curiosity that had nested in her chest.

No, she was wrong. He wasn’t at the presentation of her book, although she is convinced she had seen him for a moment, standing outside the shop, in front of the poster dominated by Eva’s face.

“No,” Kevin just says when she asks him, as indifferent as he always is.

They’re alone in the kitchen and he’s turning his back to her, focused on the ritual of preparing his sandwich. He’s mostly made his own snacks for years now, but he never kicked the habit – which Eva finds repulsive – of using an enormous quantity of jelly.

This time, like every time, Kevin smashes it down between the two slices of bread, letting the excess substance spread all over the plate.

Eva observes him for a moment, studying his red-stained fingers. She examines the simple syllable he uttered, and tries to guess if Kevin lied.

She really is sure it was him. Why would a different tall, dark-haired teen find himself right in front of that same bookshop? Even Celia claimed she saw him; it was her, in fact, who pointed him out to Eva.

Why deny?

Eva controls the slight shaking in her hands as she continues to dice the meat she’s preparing for dinner.

With deliberate nonchalance, meticulously dosing caution and anticipation, she suggests the two of them might spend a day together. Just the two of them.

They might go out and do something fun, something Kevin wants to do. Then later they could dress up nicely and go out for dinner.

Eva holds her breath after saying it.

When Kevin accepts, for an instant, her heart almost jumps into her throat.

-

Eva slips out of her clothes, dampened with rain, carrying the strong smell of artificial grass from the mini-golf court.

She’s alone in the bedroom; Franklin must be in the living room with Celia.

She told Kevin to get dressed for the last part of their mother-and-son outing: dinner.

Eva breathes quietly, inhaling slowly and releasing the air with a small sigh. The afternoon didn’t go just quite the way she had hoped for; but she and her son had fun, they played on the court, they almost got to _talk_.

Relief rushes fast from her chest to the rest of her body, loosening the tension in her arms, in her legs, in her hands and feet. Only then Eva realizes just how much, throughout the entire time they have spent together, she has remained in a state of alert, expecting their fragile harmony to be shattered at any moment.

The same way it happens every time.

It could have been much worse. She can’t help but think that for tonight, _disaster_ has been averted.

She catches her own reflection as she undresses, standing in front of the rectangular full-figure mirror.

Rain droplets have clung to strands of her thin, dark hair, making them frizzy. She runs her fingertips through them, combing them slowly, and they go back to looking shiny and soft.

In the dim light her pale skin looks translucent, marked by a web of thin wrinkles that seems to keep expanding every day. That sprinkling of freckles on her shoulders, still, provides a youthful touch.

She is wearing plain cotton underwear, black bra and black panties; simple and practical. Eva takes meticulous care of her appearance, still, as a matter of principle. She always makes sure of presenting herself impeccably, even now that housekeeping continues to fill up the better part of her days.

She does it for herself; certainly not for Franklin, who no longer pays any attention to these details. They haven’t had sex in many years, and the bed that they share is cold, nothing other than the place where they both fall asleep at the end of every day.

Eva has never gone looking for a lover, although she could find one.

Now she studies herself, and she isn’t entirely dissatisfied with what she sees.

Her body is still slim, her stomach flat, although her hips have grown a bit wider, her breasts are less firm than when she was in her twenties.

She was never fat; she never tolerated the thought. After each pregnancy, she always did whatever she could to shed that excess of weight and flesh as fast as she could, to shave it off her body and go back to being herself, with her slender legs and thin arms, with her angular face and her sharp bones.

Eva steps away from the mirror and starts rummaging through the drawers, delicately grazing the piles of clothes with her fingertips.

She picks items more elegant than what she usually wears; a dark v-neck shirt that compliments her figure, a knee-length skirt, high heels. Why not allow herself to have this?

Franklin may no longer care much about her appearance, but it matters to Eva.

She even draws on her lips with a layer of dark red lipstick; the bold color stands out unusually on her pale face.

Eva straightens her shoulders. She pats down the hem of her skirt, smoothing it out repeatedly, and she attempts an uncertain smile in the mirror.

As she walks along the corridor, her throat closes up and a warm tingling feeling begins to grow inside her belly.

-

Eva and Kevin get out of the car.

The rain has stopped. The air on this evening in spring is warm and pleasant, although a cool breeze blowing on bare portions of skin still reminds them summer hasn’t come yet.

Eva precedes him along the large drive way leading to the entrance of the restaurant.

She chose an elegant place where they’ve never been. Italian cuisine. She figured that a neutral ground, devoid of traces of the past, could be more exciting, less – _dangerous_.

Kevin walks in her two, just a few steps behind. With every step his arm swings forward almost enough for his hand to brush against Eva’s shoulder, without ever touching her.

With her head high against the dark blue sky, for a moment Eva is almost swept back to the time when her writing career was soaring; when her opinion was renowned and her face and her name were on the cover of her books, on the glossy pages of famous travel magazines.

In the garden that surrounds the restaurant other customers are gathering, entering in groups or in pairs.

Their eyes seem to linger on the singular couple, on the wall woman with dark hair and the teenage boy dressed in white.

A sudden rush of pleasure and pride nearly makes Eva blush.

She had to insist that Kevin wear something suitable for the occasion; but now she glances sideways at him and declares to herself it has been worth it.

With his white shirt, black trousers, his soft hair moved by the wind, he looks much more distinguished than usual. At fifteen, Kevin is as tall as her, and tonight, he looks almost like an adult.

The people watching them, what are they thinking? Have they guessed that they are mother and son, have they noticed the likeness in their features?

The way Kevin and her behave toward one another certainly isn’t characterized by many public displays of affections; still, there is something that feels like complicity about being out together, only the two of them, having left her husband and Celie at home.

Eva’s heels clack on the ground and she thinks that in a different existence, in another story, the boy at her side would not be her son.

He could be the charming neighbor during her stay in a small, suggestive location in southern Spain. The exotic, tender lover embraced for two days in the sweat of burning summer nights, and then never seen again.

She does not feel _that_ sort of desire toward Kevin, certainly not. It’s just that fantasy is a habit because it’s so often that much more appealing than her reality.

Maybe tonight, for once, she won’t need it.

She turns to him and attempts a timid smile in his direction. Kevin does not reciprocate.

He seems calm, but he’s been quiet for the entire time in the car; now, all of a sudden, he’s turned serious.

Eva represses the surging impulse to touch his shoulder or his arm.

“Come on. Let’s go,” she just says, quietly.


	5. red

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the first time in fifteen years, Eva can no longer access that safe world inside of her.

Eva is lying on the couch and her body is shaking.

She stares at the ceiling.

There is red everywhere.

She sees the bodies of her husband and her daughter scattered on the ground. Their clothes drenched in water. Shapeless crimson stains widening on their backs, like the floral patterns on one of her tunics.

She sees the shocking yellow tinge of bike chains that lock the doors inside a school and trap innocent students and seal their horrendous fate. Because of _her_.

She grabs one of the cushions with both hands.

She presses it over her face and she screams and she cries against the fabric, until her tears and her spit all run out and the last of her voice leaves for good.

For the first time in fifteen years, Eva can no longer access that safe world inside of her.

She can still envision it, almost; but it’s only from afar, as if through a fogged up window pane.

She and Franklin are married and they love each other. Kevin and Celia are two loved children, two wanted children, who grow up and they’re bright, and kind, and happy.

That world is a dream. That world is a lie.

The other life does not exist, and it was never there.

Eva’s reality, her present, is a nightmare of her own making, and there is no waking up that can make it disappear.


	6. orange

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I thought I knew... now I'm not so sure."

_“I thought I knew… now I’m not so sure.”_

Kevin’s answer lingers, suspended in mid-air.

The room where their visitation time takes place is shrouded in semi-darkness, cut diagonally by a ray of sunlight coming from a small square window at the top of the wall.

The officer stands in a corner, a silent presence. Eva doesn’t know if the woman is looking at them, if she is listening to what they’re saying, and she doesn’t care.

She stands up. When her feet touch the ground, she finds her legs unsteady.

She walks around the metal table that divides them. The battlefield on which they have faced one another, over the course of the last two years.

Today is the last time. Tomorrow, Kevin will no longer be here; he will be transferred to an adult prison, locked up together with grown men who have committed atrocities that surpass his own. As difficult to conceptualize as that may be.

_“Do you have any idea what those places are like?”_ he asked her just a few moments earlier, with a tone that wanted to be of sneering superiority and instead betrayed a shiver of fear.

Fear of finding himself, for the first time, facing something unknown against which even his cruelties, big and small, are powerless.

No, Eva knows next to nothing of what those prisons are like; but she can imagine.

And Eva knows that when Kevin is released – and it might be in a few years, probably – her son is going to need a familiar place to come back to.

Eva gets closer.

Kevin is standing in front of her, his wrists held together by metal handcuffs. His hair is shaved short and there are bruises on his face that weren’t there the last time. His shoulders are curved forward, and despite his tall figure, he almost seems too frail for his baggy orange uniform.

For what feels like an eternity, Eva doesn’t breathe.

She slides her arms around him and she holds him to her chest.

She rests a hand on his head.

Kevin’s body stiffens; but he doesn’t fight. He doesn’t escape her.

He doesn’t hug her back, but he allows himself to be hugged.

Eva didn’t think he would answer her _“Why?”_

The answer he has given her is not nearly enough to be an explanation; but it’s better than his silence.

It’s a beginning. A minuscule spark of hope.

Eva keeps holding Kevin.

In a different life, all the horror that they have caused never would have happened.

But _this_ is the only life they have.

In this life, maybe, now Kevin can begin to forgive his mother.

Now, in this life, Eva Khatchadourian loves her son.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun translation fact:  
The detail of Eva referring to Kevin as "it" in the beginning of the narration is a very fortunate piece of translation magic that came to my mind as I was trying to convey Eva's coldness.   
Italian does not have a neutral way of referring to animals or inanimate objects that is different from the way we talk about living creatures. In the original text, Eva's thought pattern around Kevin is cold and detached, but she is simply referring to him in the standard way one speaks about a masculine person; her language isn't explicitly de-humanizing.   
When I was thinking about how to translate her initial lines about Kevin, I realized that using "it" in English might be a very interesting way of expressing an additional, harsher layer of distance and discomfort.


End file.
